A little over a year ago, we posed ourselves that question. It was an interesting challenge – one of turning the problem that most local food distributors have on its head.

By now, most of us are aware that local food distribution has a glass ceiling – it’s about 70-80 deliveries per week where the admin burden really kicks in and stifles growth. [tweet this]

There’s just too much complexity to handle with spreadsheets and hacked together systems when you hit this number – you’re bound to start making errors – whether it’s making sure someone’s paid their bill, that one of the boxes should’ve had artichokes instead of carrots, or that Bob & Karen had just moved house. You know – that bit of information you scribbled on a sticky note and pinned to the wall?

So, the glass ceiling is really the automation of those labour intensive admin tasks – packing sheets, customer ledgers, delivery reconciliation and matching up payments. Take away that glass ceiling, and we know that many local food schemes can grow, get more quality & healthy food to people, and be more profitable. We know this from the handful of schemes who have invested heavily in their technology and grown accordingly.

Back to the question – how can we change the game? How can we get more local food distribution businesses operating, serving different markets & communities, providing more demand for small farms & artisan producers? How can we shift the needle on the destructive nature of industrialised food systems? How can we bring back the food webs that existed pre-industrial food distribution? Lets call that our vision of the Food Web 2.0.

The answer is not simple, but it’s the challenge that we took on. It’s the challenge that we have spent well over a year working on in various forms, and it’s the challenge that we’ve got our first solution to. Bucky Box is about bringing those tools to the masses, to the other 90% – to anyone who wants to start up a food distribution business [tweet], whether it’s 20 people in their local office, 200 people at their local church, or 2000 people in their community. Simple to use. Affordable. Ready to go.

We’ve got some exciting news in the pipeline to get a little bit of a buzz going around Local Food distribution, as we genuinely believe decentalising food distribution is one of the most exciting challenges & opportunities in c21st. <- [tweet].

It’s the forefront of enabling regenerative agriculture, improving the health of ourselves and our communities, and of lifting people around the world out of poverty. <- [tweet]

One thing we realised yesterday is that the change we wanted to see, is already starting to occur. Whilst chatting to a particularly inspirational local food distributor in New Zealand, he told us “I realised that the software would cost upwards of 10’s of thousands of dollars to build, and was almost ready to give up on the idea, but then I opened the paper and read that Herald article, and thought ‘Hallelujah!’ someone’s already doing it! I had to get in touch, and it’s exactly what I need, at a tiny fraction of the cost of what it would cost to do it myself.”

Bucky Box is working on the new operating system for emerging local food systems. We’re open for beta testing in invite-only form. Feel free to share the word to local food distributors you think might be interested.

Creating the new operating system for local food isn’t just about supporting what’s going out in the market, it goes much bigger & broader than that, it reaches into the future. We see what has happened in the last 30-40 years in our global food systems as a step backwards in environmental & social standards which have borrowed from our future. We’ve created a more fragile food system with less resilience, and now the pressures are beginning to mount up : population growth, soil health, water quality, climate change adaptation, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functions which are vital to our survival. All the research points toward moving to sustainable food production, distribution & consumption, which largely means small scale farms (not industrial-scale mono-cropping), regenerative farming techniques (not chemical farming which destroys our soils) and regional food systems (not industrialized supply chains). We see a better way, and Bucky Box is our first step in making that vision a reality.

Not only are we creating cutting-edge software for the local food movement, but our social enterprise structure means that we’re going to be putting a minimum of 66% of our profits back into the movement itself through our partnerships with local food systems researchers, advocates, educators & practitioners. More to come on that matter soon, so connect with us at @buckybox and be the first to hear.

Hashtags are a great way to follow specific areas of interest on Twitter, so here’s our run down of hashtags we follow to keep up on the amazing work going on around the world in the local & organic food movement. Set up a couple of feeds in tweetdeck / hootsuite, and watch the good news roll in!

#agchat / #foodchat – hosted by AgChat.org (“The AgChat Foundation is designed to help those who produce food, fuel, fiber and feed tell agriculture’s story from their point of view.”) – disclaimer: AgChat is sponsored by several corporate & Government interests, but there’s some interesting discussions on both sides of the fence.

#AgChatOz – spurned off the back of the success of the above – this is the space for Australian Farmers & Ag professionals to connect around their home country’s specific challenges and opportunities.

#AgriChatUK – likewise the need for connection and chatter in the UK farming community brought about this hashtag, you can read the full story here.

#AgGen – young farmers and the future of farming is discussed in this growing community. Started in the UK.

#AgChatNZ – Kiwi’s don’t like to miss out, so they spun out this hashtag to talk New Zealand farming. Largely facilitated by the Federated Farmers organisation, which is fairly conservative in their tastes, so tends to be fairly ‘conventional agriculture’ based. That said, there’s interesting work with Biological Farming in NZ, and we’re pushing hard for more Sustainable Ag content in the community too.

#goodfood – often used by daily tweeters to simply chat about their tasty dinners, but there’s quite a bit of use in relation to people & planet friendly food.

#foodtech – a thriving community is also growing around the Food+Technology Connect crew who are specifically interested in how technology can change our food system for the better. There are also great stories highlighted by the Seedstock team in regards to sustainable agriculture focusing on startups, entrepreneurship, technology, urban agriculture, news and research

#localfoodsoftware – popping up now & then as more software, like Bucky Box, becomes available.

Kiwi software company, Bucky Box, are on a social and environmental mission to disrupt the global food system and this week they’ve announced the public release of their software for local food distribution.

The social enterprise company aims to level the playing field against the industrial food distributors such as the large supermarket chains which account for 99% of where we get our food.

Bucky Box is a web-based application targeted at local vegetable box schemes, community-supported-agriculture and food co-ops, and has been doing private trials for 18 months.

Community Connector, Sam Rye commented, “We’ve put a lot of work into making the software simple and easy to use, yet it’s pretty sophisticated under the hood – it captures two years of learnings and conversations with local foodies all over the world. We were amazed at how much interest there was both in New Zealand and overseas.”

The local food movement has been growing in New Zealand, and is already in full flight around the world especially in the countries where food has become highly industrialised such as the US, UK & Australia. Rooted in the idea that farmers should get a fair deal, many people are unable to afford fruit and vegetables, and our over-reliance on cheap oil throughout food production, storage & transport, the movement sees farmers & entrepreneurs taking up the challenge to cut out the middleman and go direct to consumer.

“Whilst getting a box scheme up and running in Auckland, I started looking around at people all over the world doing the same thing, and realising how inefficient we were being by running things with spreadsheets & scraps of paper. Having a background in software development from the first smartphone days, I realised we could do this better. Early indications from our beta testing shows about 80% reductions in admin time and we’re still launching new features.” says Will Lau, the founder of Bucky Box.

The story goes that Bucky Box found it’s team at the disruptive incubator, Enspiral in Wellington, where they established an innovative social enterprise structure which will see a 67% profit share back into the local food movement through collaborative partnerships.

“We wanted to ensure our intentions were clear and that we didn’t end up extracting value out of the very people we seek to support – small scale farmers and the lifeblood of all local economies; small businesses & entrepreneurs. So, we set up this new style of business model we call social enterprise.” said Lau.

“We’re incredibly excited to be based in Wellington where we can feel a new kind of business emerging in our networks. Social innovation is indeed alive and kicking in the Creative Capital, and we’re stoked to be a part of that, something that people can point to and show what 21st century business will look like.” said Rye.

Bucky Box has already received international recognition from the likes of Fast Company and Springwise, and is set to launch the software globally from 1 November.

Bucky Box was formed as a social enterprise in 2011 with a vision to catalyse local food, globally.

With a mission to ‘bring about a human food system that supports the collective long term health of all living systems’, Bucky Box is a new type of business.

The software is beautifully designed & intuitive to use; it tackles online ordering, customer database, packing & delivery logistics and payment reconciliation. It is offered on a software-as-a-service basis, and can be used in any country in the world with an internet connection.

Bucky Box is part of the Enspiral group – a social innovation accelerator and eco-system based in Wellington, New Zealand